​According to Ted Morgan, author of William S. Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw(which Burroughs hated), the hard-living Beat writer added “teacher” to the list of jobs he did not like after an unhappy semester teaching creative writing at the City College of New York. He complained about dimwitted students, and disliked the job—arranged for him by Allen Ginsberg—so much that he later turned down a position at the University of Buffalo that paid $15,000 a semester, even though he desperately needed the money. That Burroughs had recently kicked heroin may have contributed to his unease with the prosaic regularities of college life. Whatever the story, he later remarked that the “teaching gig was a lesson in never again.”

​Making friends with similar interests can be a challenge for anyone. But imagine you are the founder of an entirely new discipline, with its own peculiar jargon, set of practices, and conceptual categories. Imagine, for example, that you are Sigmund Freud, who in 1896 made his break with medicine to pursue the work of psychoanalysis. Drawing on clinical experience with patients, his own self-analysis, cocaine-induced reveries, and an idiosyncratic reading of Greek mythology, Freud invented his strange psychosexual theories within the confidence of a very small circle of acquaintances and admirers.

One of his close relationships during those productive and turbulent years, with eccentric ear, nose, and throat doctor Wilhelm Fliess—a collaborator, influence, “confessor and moral supporter”—ended badly in 1906. It was in that same year that Freud met the much-younger, Carl Jung. At their first meeting, the two “talked nonstop for 13 hours,” the Aeon video above, animated by Andrew Khosravani, tells us. Thus began the intense and now-legendary six-year friendship between the psychiatrists, a “passionate and surpassingly weird relationship, which, given the people involved, perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise.” Freud settled upon Jung as his protege and successor, the “Joshua to my Moses,” overjoyed to have found a friend who seemed to understand his ideas intimately.

ATHENS (Reuters) - British singer and actor Sting called world leaders “half men and cowards” on Saturday for their incapacity to find a solution for refugee crisis.

​German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already played down the advance of a breakthrough at hastily-arranged talks among EU leaders on Sunday on the migration dispute dividing Europe and threatening her own government.
​
Austrian Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said on Saturday he expects a series reaction across the European Union if Germany closes its borders to refugees.

​Quentin Tarantino’s star-studded “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” just landed another legendary actor: Al Pacino.

Pacino will play Marvin Shwarz — Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s agent in the Sony film — marking his first collaboration with Tarantino. Dating back to his first feature film, 1992’s “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino has always cast movie stars he grew up watching, from Robert Forster in “Jackie Brown” to David Carradine in the “Kill Bill” films. Pacino fits that matrix of actors who rose to fame in the 1970s.

Also joining the cast are Damian Lewis, who will play acting icon Steve McQueen, Luke Perry as Scotty Lancer, Emile Hirsch as hairstylist Jay Sebring, Dakota Fanning as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme — a member of the Manson family — Clifton Collins as Ernesto the Mexican Vaquero, Keith Jefferson as Land Pirate Keith, and Nicholas Hammond as executiveSam Wanamaker.

THERE HE WAS, laughing, but in trying to laugh in a more abandoned manner he had become preoccupied with the question of whether there was any difference at all between the burden of futility on the one hand and the burden of scorn on the other as well as with what he was laughing about anyway, because the subject was, uniquely, everything, arising from an everything that was everywhere, and, what was more, if indeed it was everything, arising out of everywhere, it would be difficult enough to decide what it was at, arising out of what, and in any case it wouldn’t be full-hearted laughter, because futility and scorn were what continually oppressed him…

—László Krasznahorkai The Last Wolf & Herman

​László Krasznahorkai was born on 5 January 1954, in Gyula, Hungary, to a lawyer and a social security administrator. He studied law and Hungarian language and literature at university, and, after some years as an editor, became a freelance writer. His first novel, Satantango (1985), pushed him to the centre of Hungarian literary life and is still his best known. He didn’t leave Communist Hungary until 1987, when he travelled to West Berlin for a fellowship – and he has lived in a number of countries since, but returning regularly to Hungary.

His main literary hero is, he says, Kafka: “I follow him always.”

Reading Krasznahorkai is like entering one of Kafka’s burrows and realizing there will never be an exit, that the darkness, the bleak walls of dampness, the hollows and interminable false passages leading nowhere is all there is: a labyrinth of endless futility and despair. And, yet, in the midst of this monstrous world of bleakness one begins to laugh, one understands that the deft markers of some strangeness and vision of life within the decay and rottenness harbors an infernal paradise full of something else, an excess: a life unbidden and away. To enter these bleak hollows is to know that life offers no hope, only the power of the mind to challenge itself and explore what is in excess of itself. Even in the most terrible corners of this blasted universe of death we find certain forms of contingent change, moments of clarity and brilliance that catch us off-guard and bring us not hope but rather that surprise we so long for of something new arising out of the pure negativity of all that is. This is what it is like to come upon the works of Krasznahorkai.

​His first novel Satantangoreviewed in the Guardian. Which it calls “brutal, relentless and so amazingly bleak that it’s often quite funny”. One might be reminded here of Kafka’s Castle where the protagonist wanders around a fortress world that has the flavor of an anti-gnostic gnosis in which nothing is ever revealed yet everything, every object hints at even darker regions below the threshold of our paranoid gaze. If Krasznahorkai is a parodist of strange ideas, a prophet not so much of those hidden recesses of a monstrous universe but of the openness of the human heart to the incompleteness surrounding it, then he is in actuality a gifted martyr of those broken worlds we all inhabit, a guide into the corrupted corridors of our decaying and unraveling universe. Another Stranger in a Strange Land seeking neither solace nor salvation, but rather the powers of mind over the universe of death surrounding it. Crafting words that break the vessels of meaning and bring forth light out of the decay of broken things. Bleak? Only if you do not know how to laugh.
​
Enter if you dare! His books on Amazon.com: here!

​We think of David Lynch as a filmmaker, and rightly so, but the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive has long kept a more diverse creative portfolio. He began as a painter, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and has also tried his hand at photography, music, and comic strips. More recently, writes the AV Club's Randall Colburn, "Lynch has also released his own line of coffee, collaborated on Twin Peaks-themed beer and skateboards, and created his own festival. His latest endeavor? T-shirts, which is wild because it’s hard to imagine the ever-dapper filmmaker ever wearing one."
​
Perhaps a line of Lynch-approved traditional white shirts, made to be buttoned all the way up even without a tie, remains in development. But for now, fans choose from the 57 T-shirts designs now available at Studio: David Lynch's Amazon store. All suitable for wearing to your local revival house, they include "Turkey Cheese Head,""Cowboy,""Small Dog,""Small Barking Dog,"and "You Gotta Be Kiddin' Me." What kind of life, now solidly into its eighth decade, has both enabled and driven Lynch to make not just so many things, but so many Lynchian things? Perhaps we can find a few answers within the nearly 600 pages of Room to Dream, Lynch's new memoir.

The light was departing. The brown air drew down
all the earth’s creatures, calling them to rest
from their day-roving, as I, one man alone,

prepared myself to face the double war
of the journey and the pity, which memory
shall here set down, nor hesitate, nor err.

​Reading Dante’s Inferno, and Divine Comedy generally, can seem a daunting task, what with the book’s wealth of allusion to 14th-century Florentine politics and medieval Catholic theology. Much depends upon a good translation. Maybe it’s fitting that the proverb about translators as traitors comes from Italian. The first Dante that came my way—the unabridged Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed English translation—renders the poet’s terza rima in leaden prose, which may well be a written betrayal.

Gone is the rhyme scheme, self-contained stanzas, and poetic compression, replaced by wordiness, antiquated diction, and needless density. I labored through the text and did not much enjoy it. I’m far from an expert by any reach out but was much relieved to later discover John Ciardi’s more faithful English rendering, which immediately impresses upon the senses and the memory, as in the description above in the first stanzas of Canto II.

​By focusing on Kahlo’s life and her suffering rather than her art, this memorabilia-stuffed exhibition stifles her burning visionary brilliancy

​This feels wrong. I am looking at Frida Kahlo’s prosthetic leg. There is a magical red boot on it. The matching boot is also in the display case, yet the woman who wore the leg and boots is long gone. She died in 1954 when she was 47. Would she want her artificial limb to outlive her like this?

​It’s true, she wore it bravely. Everything about Kahlo was courageous. She was a revolutionary, a passionate lover, a bold artist. As a child she survived infantile paralysis, then in 1925, when she was 18, she was in a bus crash that left her with lifelong disability and pain. At the heart of the V&A’s highly unusual and problematic retrospective is a shrine to that pain. There are corsets and body casts on which she painted the communist hammer and sickle; medicines and painkillers, crutches and built-up shoes. However, there are simply not enough of her compelling works of art.

Kahlo was, as this exhibition reveals with sensationalist clarity, someone who suffered. Yet she was also someone who created. She did not endure her life. She transfigured it, into blazing, visionary paintings. These take a back seat at the V&A to Kahlo’s clothes, makeup, and iconic image. I suppose this is what artistic fame looks like in 2018.

Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles, who co-hosted the awards show, booted things off with a piano duet in which they poked fun at the fact that neither of them has won Tony or Grammy Awards.

"Neither one of us has ever won anything. So this is for the people who lose," the hosts sang.

Both have made their Broadway debuts, Groban in 2016's "Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812," and Bareilles in 2017's "Waitress."

Andrew Garfield gave a passionate speech while accepting the award for lead actor in a play for his work in "Angels in America. He referenced a recent Supreme Court decision relating to a Colorado baker to who declined to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.
​
"We are all sacred and we all belong," Garfield said. "So, let's just bake a cake for everyone who wants a cake to be baked."

Bruce Springsteen won a special Tony Award for his sold-out Broadway show, "Springsteen on Broadway." He also performed "My Hometown" later in the night.

Actor Robert DeNiro caused a stir while introducing Springsteen's performance. The actor cursed twice saying, "f**k Trump." He received a standing ovation.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and Broadway star, Chita Rivera both received lifetime achievement awards.
​
An emotional moment came when the drama students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas sang "Seasons of Love" from the Broadway musical "Rent."

​The Happy Prince, the admired biopic of Oscar Wilde, is more than a career-reviving film for the actor and director, it is an avowal of an enduring literary love

Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde in his film The Happy Prince, which premiered in the UK on 5 June. Photograph: Allstar/Lionsgate

​The surprised delight that met Rupert Everett’s second volume of memoir, Vanished Years, six years ago was a hint of what might be to come. The calibre of the writing matched any living diarist, according to a broad cross-section of reviewers, from Julie Burchill in the Guardian to the Telegraph’s Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who awarded five stars and revelled in the way the author “repeatedly slips the gears of genre, moving between scenes of farce, elegy and melodrama”. He predicted more “seriously good books” ahead, if only Everett would take himself “seriously enough”.
​
Well, now we know exactly what Rupert wrote next – a screenplay. And his new film biography of Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince, has wowed film critics in much the same way. To add to his triumph, Everett also produces, stars and directs, appearing alongside Colin Firth and Julian Wadham, two of his oldest theatrical buddies. “I loved working with me as an actor,” Everett quipped to red carpet reporters at the film’s London premiere last Tuesday.

Yet the real love affair here is not between Everett and himself, as he regularly teases. The truly enduring relationship is with Wilde, whose plays Everett has now appeared in on stage and whom he has played in productions, and whose tragic personal story the actor has struggled for years to bring to the screen.

The history of philosophy conceived as the elaboration of a programme for artificial general intelligence; intelligence understood as the impersonal and collective evolution of a thought that realizes itself according to a view from nowhere and nowhen.

InIntelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of history. Intelligence pierces through what seems to be the totality or the inevitable outcome of its history, be it the manifest portrait of the human or technocapitalism as the alleged pilot of history.

Building on Hegel’s account of geist as a multi-agent conception of mind and Kant’s transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism. The assumptions of the former are exposed by way of a critique of the transcendental structure of experience as a tissue of subjective or psychological dogmas, the claims of the latter regarding the ubiquity of mind or the inevitable advent of an unconstrained superintelligence are challenged as no more than ideological fixations which do not stand the test of systematic scrutiny.

This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism, and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages, opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence, and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.

Starring Julian Barratt and admire by Paul Thomas Anderson, Flowers is grotesque, surreal – and part of a new wave of TV exploring mental health

​In the very first minutes of the sitcom Flowers, Julian Barratt’s character, Maurice, a depressed children’s author, ties a noose to a tree, slips it around his neck and jumps from a chair. The branch snaps almost immediately. “Fuck’s sake,” he grumbles and trudges back inside.

That first series, broadcast two years ago, was bolstered by an extraordinary cast including Olivia Colman (soon to play Elizabeth II in The Crown) and Daniel Rigby, who won a Bafta playing Eric Morecambe. Bold and grotesque, it had the feel of a grown-up fairytale, a strange, sad and often very funny story of depression and family dysfunction.

“I signed up having read the scripts and finding them brilliant,” says Barratt, who spends much of the second series dealing with the aftermath of the first – and wearing running shorts. “It’s not a standard sitcom.”

The prize-winning writer on prophecy, political pessimism and her love of London

​When Kamila Shamsie started her novel Home Fire in 2015, Sadiq Khan had yet to launch his campaign to become London’s mayor and the idea of a Muslim home secretary would have been dismissed as a futuristic fantasy. As she stepped up to get, the Women’s award for fiction this week, both had come to pass, along with several more chilling scenarios in her updating of the classical tragedy Antigone to multicultural Britain today.

After the banker-turned-Conservative MP Sajid Javid was promoted to the Home Office, a supporter went so far as to create a twitter hashtag, #nostrashamsie. But to those who tell her that the vibrancy of the novel has grown exponentially since it was published last year, Shamsie briskly responds: “I’m not a soothsayer – these things were in the water.”

The Pakistani-born daughter of a businessman and a leading critic and literary historian, Shamsie has lived in London since the mid-noughties. Two years before starting work on the novel, she became a British citizen, “so I was very aware of what was going on around citizenship and how easy it was to fall between the cracks. Until then, each time I signed a form for residency renovation I was incredibly tense: what would have happened if I had ticked one box wrongly?”

​Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds, this comprehensive collection brings together the work of an acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 – 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on “Acid Communism”; and a number of main interviews from the last decade.

​Humorist and movie reviewer Joe Queenan once stood outside a theatre after a screening of Jurassic Park and asked each to leave the viewer if they knew who directed the film they'd just seen. Only five out of the men who talked to him, he reported, could name Steven Spielberg. (Not just one but two of those who couldn't be said, inexplicably, that the Michael Crichton adaptation had been directed by Stephen King.)

​Queenan pulled this inhibit as an informal test of "auteur theory," which holds that the director, despite the inherently collaborative character of the medium, is ultimately the "author" of a motion picture. But what does it say about auteur theory that half of his sample of viewers couldn't come up with the name of quite possibly the most famous filmmaker alive? Does the identity of a film's director matter as much as those of us who subscribe to auteur theory believe it does?

​A lyric, sick-humoured and immoral morass of a novel told through reportage from the least-illuminated angles of the human condition, Warewolff! is a lexicon-in-pieces; a novel blasted into fragments.

Amalgamating nuclear warfare, Paris Vogue, and ‘lavish deformities’, it merges a bold experimentation with a literary sensibility and a pitch black, plague-bearing playfulness.

Taken as an entirety, the fragments of the novel gradually congeal to form an image of a hidden, numinous ‘other’ that lies behind the facade of the text – too terrifying to comprehend but in its facets: a being that learns to talk by shaping the stories of its victims. Warewolff! is at once the summary of those encounters, their metamorphosis, and the corrupted, deprived imago that it forces them to be.

Memoir from a Parallel Universe

Applied Ballardianism is an astonishing book, part fictionalized hallucinatory memoir, part essential Ballard primer, all written in the style of the great man himself. Whether you’re new to JG Ballard or a lifelong fan, this is a thrilling read, cut through with equal parts black humor, cultural insight, and existential horror.

–Tim Maughan, author of Paintwork and Infinite Detail

In Applied Ballardianism, Simon Sellars has invented a genre all his own. But what is it, exactly? Postmodern autopathography? Rough Guide to the Desert of the Real? Notes toward a mental breakdown? The missing link between Ballard and Virilio, psychogeography and edgeland studies, Mad Max and Videodrome? One thing is certain: Applied Ballardianism is the only book you’ll need when you’re marooned on a concrete island, barricaded in a high rise that’s descending into anarchy, or cast away on some Enewetak of the unconscious.

​–Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

At first, Simon Sellars appears to be a character in a JG Ballard novel. Then Ballard appears to be a character in a Simon Sellars novel. Then not just the characters but the whole setting and ambience appear to be at once Ballardian and Sellarsian. Then you finish the book and you seem to be a character in a novel the two of them conspired to write. And your perception of the world is never the same again.

​Everybody knows a fact or two about the United States of America, even those who've never set foot there. At the very least, they know the US is a big country, but it's one thing to know that and another to truly understand the scale involved. Today we offer you an artifact from cartographic history that illustrates it vividly: a 19th-century traveler's map of the Mississippi River that, in order to display the length of that mighty 2,320-mile waterway, extends to a full eleven feet. (Or, for those especially unfamiliar with how things are in America, displays the river's full 3,734-kilometer length at a full 3.35 meters.)
​
With a width of only three inches (or 7.62 centimeters), the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waterscame on a spool the reader could use to unroll it to the relevant section of the river anywhere between the Gulf of Mexico and northern Minnesota. First published in 1866, just a year after the end of the Civil War, the map "was marketed toward tourists, who were flocking to the Mississippi to see the sights and ride the steamboats." So writes Atlas Obscura's Cara Giamo, who quotes art historian Nenette Luarca-Shoaf as describing the river as “a source of great awe. That kind of length, that kind of spaciousness was incomprehensible to a lot of folks who were coming from the East Coast."

A 2016 trip to Mumbai resulted in what would be Howard Hodgkin’s final paintings. Knocking with color and feeling, they are a vivid and furious epitaph

Last burst … A Green Thought in a Green Shade by Howard Hodgkin – now on show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill. Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates/Howard Hodgkin Estate, courtesy Gagosian

Howard Hodgkin would sometimes lose heart and his partner Antony Peattie would say: “Shall I get the scissors?” They both knew what he meant, says Peattie, as we look at Hodgkin’s final paintings in a back room at the Gagosian gallery in London. It was a joke about the great colourist Henri Matisse, who started snipping paper cutouts when illness and age left him too weak to paint.

In fact, although he used a wheelchair in his final years, Hodgkin never needed the scissors. He was to die practically brush in hand. In 2014, sitting in his skylit studio close to the British Museum, the painter told me: “I know that once I can’t paint any more, they should start measuring for my coffin.” An exhibition of his final, powerful paintings at the Gagosian shows how true those words were. Even as his health failed, Hodgkin found a way to paint. When he stopped, it was to go to hospital for the last time.
​
Hodgkin painted his very last works in the winter of 2016-17 in Mumbai, a city that always filled this remarkable artist with renewed energy. It was not a holiday, though, but a carefully planned painting trip. “We got there in December and he just wanted to work,” says Peattie. “I think all the pictures were in his head. He just wanted to get to Mumbai to paint them out.”

Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him—and rightly so—philosophy infected every area of life.

​—Simon Critchley

​During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land’s unique work, variously described as ‘rabid nihilism’, ‘mad black deleuzianism’ and ‘cybergothic’, developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of ‘continental philosophy’—a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land’s work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British ‘speculative realist’ philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.

Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids.

Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker’s work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

​Those controversies carry on as many people are now concerned over his current health. As Billboard reports, Depp took some photos with fans while performing in St. Petersburg, Russia with his band, Hollywood Vampires. As you can see in the photos below, the blockbuster star has certainly lost a substantial amount of weight, which has led many to speculate whether he’s “sick” or “weak.”

On June 10th, at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, director Arwen Curry will premiere Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the first feature film about the revolutionary science fiction writer. The film's website notes that "Curry filmed with Le Guin for 10 years to produce the film, which unfolds an intimate journey of self-discovery as Le Guin comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way." Starring Le Guin herself, who sadly passed away earlier this year, Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin trait appearances by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany, and Michael Chabon. You can watch the brand new trailer for the film above.

​The former actor was one of the first to indict producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. Now she wants to change the entire industry’s attitude towards women. ‘I know I’m on the right course,’ she says

​The day we meet, the sky is black and the rain comes fast and heavy. Rose McGowan had walked into the hotel bar looking slight, but as she sits in an armchair, her back to the window, streaks of lightning flash outside behind her head and she looks, instead, like some sort of avenging angel. “I wanted to show people around the world that you can strike at the head of power and not just bite at the ankles,” she says. “Because they can shake you off when you bite at the ankles.”

When allegations of sexual assault started to surface about the film producer Harvey Weinstein late last year – he has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex – McGowan added her voice, early and loudly. The former actor had collaborated with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times journalists who broke the story in October, passing on information about the $100,000 settlement he paid her in 1997 after an alleged assault. When Weinstein turned himself in last week, McGowan tweeted: “We got you, Harvey Weinstein, we got you.” This week, a grand jury indicted Weinstein on rape and criminal sex act charges, which he denies.

“I cried the other night, finally,” she says. “I was asked a lot when he was arrested: ‘How does it feel?’ And I hadn’t really had time to process how it felt. I went to Central Park – it was around midnight – and I just cried. I cried for the girl I was, I cried for her. But today I smile for me.”

The aftermath of the story breaking has been “extreme” says McGowan, although she says she had been living through a strange and nightmarish time long before the articles came out. She alleges that, when he heard about her tell-all memoir, Brave, Weinstein hired investigators, including former agents from the Mossad, to follow her and infiltrate her circle. It sounds like an outlandish claim, but a New Yorker story corroborates it. (A Weinstein spokesman told the magazine: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”)

​Everyone knows "My Favorite Things." Most know it because of the 1965 movie version of the Broadway musical for which Richard Rodgers originally composed the song. But many jazz enthusiasts credit the one true "My Favorite Things" to a different musical genius entirely: John Coltrane. The free jazz-pioneering saxophonist's version of Rodgers' show tune (a filmed performance of which we featured here on Open Culture a few years ago) first came out as the title track of an album he put out in 1961, two years after The Sound of Music's original Broadway debut. Clocking in at nearly fourteen minutes, it gave listeners a tour de force demonstration of dramatic musical transformation.
​
"In 1960, Coltrane left Miles [Davis] and formed his own quartet to further explore modal playing, freer directions, and a growing Indian influence," says the documentary The World According to John Coltrane. "They transformed 'My Favorite Things,' the cheerful populist song from 'The Sound of Music,' into a hypnotic eastern dervish dance. The recording was a hit and became Coltrane's most requested tune—and a bridge to broad public acceptance."

If Coltrane's interpretation of the song brought it toward the East, what would an Eastern interpretation of his interpretation sound like? Now, thanks to Pakistan's Sachal Jazz Ensemble, you can hear, and see, Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" itself transformed dramatically again.